Giant pizzas, 2am pies, and other restaurant news

By the slice

Everything’s bigger in…Virginia, apparently. As of last Monday, Charlottesville is home to the newest location of Benny’s, a southern Virginia restaurant chain that serves up slices of pizza roughly the size of a small child.

According to local co-owner Nick Stancampiano, each pie is 28 inches in diameter, and a slice served in house requires not one but two paper plates (and maybe a forklift). Benny’s is keeping college students full of cheese and pepperoni in Blacksburg, Radford, Smith Mountain Lake, Roanoke, and Harrisonburg, and each location is personalized with a different last name. Charlottesville’s store, at 913 W. Main St., is called Benny Deluca’s.

Benny’s doesn’t deliver, but once students are back in town it’ll be open until 3am on weekends. The menu is pretty simple: Cheese, pepperoni, and sausage will always be available, plus two specialty options that rotate each month. August brings buffalo chicken and garlic mushroom, which Stancampiano said are two of the chain’s most popular pies.

The restaurant just got its ABC license, so it won’t be long before you can enjoy a Three Notch’d brew or a can of PBR with your 14 inches of pizza.

“Moon pie” gets a whole new meaning

The Pie Guy, a mobile food cart that serves up traditional Australian pies, will soon be available to satisfy late-night weekend munchies on the Mall. Beginning in mid-August, Justin Bagley’s cart with its single-serving sweet and savory pies will be stationed outside Chaps on Friday and Saturday nights until 3am. The Pie Guy offers seven savory pies with fillings like steak with gravy, vegetarian quinoa chili, and Thai green curry with chicken, plus a classic apple pie and $1 sodas. Each pie is $5 a pop, and it’ll save you the trouble of asking your cab driver to make a Taco Bell stop on the way home.

Box it up

“It’s been a very fun ride, but every party must come to an end,” said The Box co-owner Chas Webster.

Webster, who could often be found mixing cocktails and chatting with guests as the diminutive bar and music venue on Second Street S.E. filled up in the evenings, said last week that The Box will soon close its doors. Webster opened the downtown spot about eight years ago, and he said ongoing construction on the nearby Landmark Hotel made it difficult to run a restaurant.

“What was supposed to take three months ended up being a construction site for years, which is not very conducive to people wanting to come down and eat lunch,” Webster said.

Over the years, The Box increasingly became known as the place to go if you were looking for drinks under $10 and either a DJ or live band that would leave your ears ringing for days. Webster noted that it’s “hard to get people to come back to eat at a place that’s known as a bar.”

Webster didn’t comment on what the future holds for the space, but keep an eye on Facebook over the next couple weeks for announcements about final events and upcoming plans.

We’re always keeping an eye out for the latest news on Charlottesville’s food and drink scene, so pick up a paper and check c-ville.com/living each week for the latest Small Bites. Have a scoop for Small Bites? E-mail us at bites@c-ville.com.

I saw the TV ad for the wing eating contest. I texted to enter. I got a text back: “You are entered into the Battle of the Braveheart Wing Off Challenge! Prepare thy gullet.” I prepared my gullet. As challenge day drew near, I felt like something was up. Wouldn’t they contact me to let me know

It’s affordable, actually sustainable and certainly not the modern American lifestyle most have become accustomed to, with multiple cars per family, smart phones for everyone and streaming video on demand. The 5-year-old project called Living Energy Farm is an off-the-grid,

Ownership scramble cooking at Bluegrass Grill & Bakery Chrissy Benninger’s been part owner of Bluegrass Grill & Bakery for more than five years. Just a couple months ago, she got a bee in her bonnet to make serious changes. Why now? She’s bought out her partners, Jim and Lalah Simcoe,

As anyone who has ever worked in a professional kitchen—or any aspect of the restaurant industry—will adamantly testify: The life of a chef is by no means for the faint of heart. The hours are long and strange. The work relentlessly demanding, ulcer-inducingly stressful. And yet, we’re assured,

One of the stranger artifacts of working in an animal-centric profession is the need to clarify any time that we’re talking about the human world. We find ourselves saying awkward things like “I’m going to the people doctor” and “I need to pick up some people food.” I’ve always liked the

Crowded fitness centers can be breeding grounds for competition and hostility. Regular gym-goers decked out in Lululemon who eat, sleep and breathe working out can come across as intimidating to novices, and nobody enjoys being stared down by someone who wants a turn on the treadmill during

It’s dinner time on Tuesday evening. I sit down to a heaping plate of the delectably aromatic Turkish meal I’ve been smelling from down the hall for the past hour, my stomach growling audibly. I fill my water glass, pick up my fork, look around the table at my dining companions and…wait.

The new go-to: 12 restaurants you should know better We all have our favorite spots. We get the quick, easy grub here; we go there for special occasions. We’re not in a rut, per se, but in a town like Charlottesville, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the multitude of dining choices. Enter

Summer can mean many things. Camping, festivals, vacations—camping at a festival while on a vacation. But for the kid in us all, summer is the season of ice cream. Whether you savor it indoors by the pint or revel with a dripping cone in the afternoon sun, ice cream can warm even the coldest of

In the air The ground’s the limit It doesn’t matter how hot it is on the ground, when you’re up in a plane going close to 100mph at several thousand feet, you’ll cool right down. Then, when you leap from that plane and plummet toward the earth at (more or less) 9.81 m/s, the chill […]

The Flat’s new owners promise same tasty food What happens when one of the smallest restaurants in Charlottesville puts a small sign in its small window saying it’s closed for renovation? We hear that behind the tiny façade of The Flat on Water Street, big things are happening. Former owner

If you want to watch a bunch of food geeks bicker about something of no consequence, do some quick research on fried green tomatoes. Apparently some, like food writer and historian Robert Moss, believe the dish originated in the North and only exploded in the South after the movie of the same

Preamble When I got the assignment a couple of months ago to write about Jefferson and his protégé William Short and their dialogue about race and slavery, the nine murdered worshipers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston were still alive. We’ve lost far too many people to race-inflected

Belmont blowup Southern Crescent, a restaurant Lucinda Ewell and her husband Ian Day first envisioned opening out of their home in 2009, will never open on Hinton Avenue in Belmont. But that’s because the couple will be changing the name by the time it starts welcoming diners by early

There are few concepts more quintessentially American than gathering friends and family for a gluttonous grill-out followed by a gratuitously deafening show of explosions in the sky. While a simulated artillery strike makes for a perfectly sensible human celebration, our pets understandably

Chilly reception “Coming Soon” reads a sign that takes up an entire storefront window in the vacant spot next to Splendora’s. It’s a sign for Kilwins—a national ice cream, chocolate and fudge chain—that will be arriving this fall on the Downtown Mall. Kilwins is a “three-legged stool of

Lunch may not mean all that much to you and me. The meal’s far less “important” than breakfast, so they say, and at best it’s kind of like dinner’s kid brother. The kid brother who makes you eat salad. But if you’re a restaurant proprietor on C’ville’s Downtown Mall, you probably do a pretty

So long, farewell Fellini’s #9 will soon change hands, but current and new owners agree that, in this case, it’s definitely out with the old and in with the old. “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” says the new face of Fellini’s, Justin Butler. He is the director of operations for MJR

Brazos bravo How much do Charlottesvillians love Austin-style tacos? A whole lot, apparently, as Peter Griesar learned last fall when he opened Brazos pop-up taco shop for 60 days and had a line snaking out the door every day. Griesar’s initial plan was to test the concept here in

Catherine McMahon knows what everyone’s primary concern is when they sign up for their first stand up paddleboard yoga (SUP yoga) class, and she nips it in the bud before even getting in the water. “I totally encourage falling in,” she said to a group of first-timers at last week’s Monday